Amazon Echo Review

My Amazon Echo was purchased in September 2016 and was the first Amazon device I purchased. It sits in our lounge.

For comparison, I also have an Echo Dot, Echo Spot and an Echo Show 8.

I'm not really that interested in the main-stream smart home capabilities of the Amazon Echo range as it doesn't really add much to my contextual smart home. I am interested in where it can add value to it and benefit my family.

At the same time, I also purchased the Amazon Echo Remote to evaluate. The main reason for purchasing this at the time was because my job involved demonstrating smart home features and the remote works much more reliably in presentations and noisy environments.

Features

Microphone array to detect voice requests from distance.
Visual LED 'ring' to indicate activity and issues.
Volume +/- buttons on the top of the device.
3A microphone mute button on the top of the device, which turns the LED 'ring' red.
Bluetooth connectivity for Smartphones and other devices to push music to it.

Limitations

It obviously needs an Internet connection (via Wi-Fi to work, though the reliability of the connection has been excellent in my home as I'm using a mesh Wi-Fi solution.
It requires and Amazon account and is obviously tied into the wider Amazon eco-system.
The quality of the audio output via the in-built speaker is not good. You certainly wouldn't want to use it for music. I use mine with a separate amplifier and speakers though. This has to be switched on for you to be able to hear Alexa's response though.
These are always on devices, always using power and as such are phantom loads.

In Use

One of the more annoying things with all Amazon Echo devices is that they will occasionally and randomly active even though you didn't specifically direct a request to Alexa. This happens more often in rooms where you tend to talk more, e.g. the lounge.

Use Cases

General Knowledge

There Amazon Echo devices are general pretty good as general knowledge questions and I find myself asking Alexa random questions as they come into my head. Some recent examples from my activity feed:

How many children does Hugh Grant have?
How old is Donald Trump?
How old is Joe Biden?
Tell me about the history of the Ampersand symbol.
How long is the Le Mans F1 circuit?
Where is the Formula 1 race this weekend?

Lists

As a family, we have never really embraced shopping lists on our Echo devices but lists make a lot sense on the Echo Show 8.

Voice Control

Since the Echo is in our lounge, it sometimes gets used to control devices and appliances in the lounge. My subwoofer is one good example of this. Since the power switches are inaccessible, it is just a lot easier to use voice control.

Music

The audio quality from the Echo's in-built speaker is not brilliant but it is OK for listening to music occasionally. None of the self-contained smart speakers are particularly impressive in comparison to a dedicated amplifier and speakers and I include Sonos and Apple devices in this statement. When I do listen to music in my lounge, it is generally via my home cinema amp and surround sound speakers set-up.

Voice Announcements

One of the unsupported features I like is the ability to push voice announcements to one or more Amazon Echo devices. This means I can basically make them say anything I want and so my contextual smart home can do the same.

Summary

The Amazon Echo was the first Echo device to be launched by Amazon and it has stood the tests of time well so far. We don't really use it for music but, the in-built speaker is adequate in this respect.